Bank channel

Shelter Insurance joins the growing list of insurance companies to unwind its bank after it faced having more than $1 million in annual costs tied to Dodd-Frank.

Bank of America Corp.’s brokerage arm and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s asset-management division are among businesses ripe for divestiture if U.S. banks break up to improve stock prices, according to CLSA Ltd.’s Mike Mayo.

The banking industry is expected to benefit marginally from the deal to avert the fiscal cliff, but looming fights over tax reform and the debt ceiling remain.

Financial advisors in the bank channel often talk about “leveraging” their branch’s tellers and lenders to build their client books. But it’s the rare bank investment program that effectively ends up partnering with other bank units. Kim Burdick, senior vice president and group executive for community banking at Fremont Bank in Fremont, Calif., thinks he knows the reason. …

With an increasingly globalized community of investors, the United Nations Federal Credit Union is living up to its mandate of doing good in significant ways.

After we published our top 50 Bank Advisors list last month, a couple of advisors who didn't make the list pointed out that it was essentially based on "old" data. I noted that all data is old, otherwise it would be a projection, which I thought was somewhat meaningful. But based on the reaction, I realized that I should have said to wait until our Outlook issue in January because that would be, well, a look ahead into the new year and beyond.

Don't raise the sails just yet. But as 2013 brightens, many financial pundits foresee potentially bluer skies for investors and advisors alike.

On Wall Street profiles the most influential personalities in the advisory industry this year.

Dale Yahnke has built up $2.1 billion in AUM by focusing on low costs and specific solutions.

Advisors naively believe that only 17% of their clients hold a direct account when in fact 74% do, according to a new report from Boston-based research firm Cerulli Associates.

“My number one objective is to grow revenues from the private bank and help to make it an even greater contributor to the growth of Webster Bank,” said Daniel FitzPatrick, the new head of the business.

The nation's fourth-biggest bank by assets said in a filing with the Securities Exchange Commission on Friday that its board would improve some of its governing practices as part of the proposed pact.

“The banking space is definitely going to get smaller,” predicts Robert Bolton, president of Rochester, NY-based Iron Bay Capital, which runs a long-short fund that invests exclusively in financial institution stocks.

Among Vikram Pandit’s last jobs as Citigroup Inc.’s chief executive officer was to decide the fate of the bank’s hedge-fund unit, which employs some of his oldest colleagues. He agreed to give them most of it for free.

Hands-on testing of the latest version of PNC's Virtual Wallet reveals some improvements and some lingering performance issues.

Industry veteran Stephen Mullins will be responsible for overseeing the strategic direction of the firm and the portfolio management team.

Belinda Sherman has been promoted to president of The Huntington Investment Company, reporting to Steven Short, director of Huntington Wealth Advisors.

Bank is seeing unusual volumes of traffic, but the "vast majority" of customers are not affected, it says.

The Clearing House spent 10 months and $2 million to plan a simulation of a large bank failure — and the results are not only fascinating, they're exemplary.

It has named two industry veterans to key positions within Ascent Private Capital Management, the bank’s wealth advisory business for ultra-high-net-worth clients.